"Designer Electrons" Can Be Custom-Made for Future Devices

Electrons were fooled into behaving as though they were in a magnetic field, with no magnets around

By Clay Dillow Posted 03.14.2012 at 1:00 pm 10 Comments

Molecular Graphene Hari Manoharan / Stanford University

Researchers at Stanford and the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab have created a new kind of graphene that promises the first-ever “designer electrons” that can be custom tuned to exhibit exotic properties. This “molecular graphene” could lead to whole new types of materials with new electrical properties, which in turn could spawn whole new kinds of devices.

The way electrons conduct their business is central to just about everything we consider modern electronic technology. For the most part, those properties are fairly well-defined, and we manipulate those properties to create everything from better batteries to larger memory storage devices to faster computer chips. The advent of graphene has opened the door to whole new kinds of materials with strange new electronic properties, a niche of materials science whose surface is only beginning to be scratched.

The Stanford/SLAC team’s findings, reported today in the journal Nature, definitely put another deep divot in that surface. The team reports that it has created custom-made honeycomb-shaped structures that are inspired by graphene but that are tuned to make electrons behave in ways that are different even from their strange behavior in regular graphene.

By moving carbon monoxide molecules around with a scanning tunneling microscope, they were able to change the symmetry of electron flows in such ways that it appeared they were being acted upon by magnetic or electrical fields, though no such fields were present. In other experiments, they were able to move carbon molecules around to alter the electron density in different ways.

All that is to say that they were able to tune the electrons in predictable ways without actually introducing, say, a magnetic field to them. This ability to purposefully change electron behavior is new, and something that could lead to a range of designer structures beyond molecular graphene that could have very useful nanoscale electrical properties.

Previous Article: Is It Possible to "Brooklynize" Floridian Tap Water? A Bagelmaker Says Yes, A Lawsuit Says No

Next Article: Russian and Korean Researchers Will Inject Mammoth DNA Into Elephant Eggs, Resurrecting 10,000-Year-Old Beast

10 Comments

Link to this comment

contra_dictions

03/14/12 at 9:24 pm

Well I'm happy as long as it doesn't stick to my *ss after wiping.

Link to this comment

Robot

03/14/12 at 10:32 pm

Sorry, sorry, POPSCI, you put a commercial in front of the video or at least allowed it to be there...

SO the whole article is just a teaser for the commercial.
Well, I stopped myself from watching the video and I am done with the article. Rasberry, pltzzzzzz!

It is just spam by a different avenue.

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.

Link to this comment

matsci1

03/16/12 at 9:31 am

I disagree strongly with the concept of “Designer Electrons “ . An electron is an electron…period. It has certain characteristics that are described mathematically
and it behaves as it does.

However, we can change the environment in which it exists to bring out various results. For instance,for ceramic materials, the mobility is directly connected with the density of states in the conduction band. Dope the material with something that will raise the density of states in this region and…WALLA…a higher conductivity for the same amount of electrons in the conduction band because of the mobility increase.

Link to this comment

lonefox

03/16/12 at 10:41 am

Is amusued that the video is for another article..unless honey bees defensive formation are some how a product of advance "exotic" electon comptuers
maybe....

Link to this comment

adaptation

03/17/12 at 1:20 am

I think the editor was told to put the video on the bee article and thought this was it because of the photo, it kindof looks like a thermal image of a beehive.

Link to this comment

Clay Ferguson

03/17/12 at 2:28 am

@matsci1 - you are taking the authors words too literally, because this is not about properties of any individual electrons, but rather how thay can be manipulated in strange new ways.

My thoughts:
What's cool is that even graphene itself is a regular grid structure that is a single atom thick, and seems like the type of things 3D printers could be done one layer at a time. Think of manufacturing a 'perfect pyramid' for example. That would act as a 'perfect prism'. Light could be analyzed in a MUCH more precise way with this. Questions even as crazy as "is time quantized" and many planc level things could be studied in greater detail with 'perfect, ideal, lenses, etc'

Link to this comment

matsci1

03/17/12 at 12:33 pm

Mr. Ferguson,
I do not think I am taking the words to literally but just as they are written. I would suggest a title of “Designer Graphene” rather than “Designer Electrons”. When one reads the article it is about the Graphene that is being manipulated and not the electrons. When Mr. Dillow writes in the article “For the most part, those properties are fairly well-defined, and we manipulate those properties to create everything from better batteries to larger memory storage devices to faster computer chips.” That can be a bit misleading how it is written because it sounds like the properties of the electrons are being manipulated.

Doping materials or using different processing techniques to enhance or suppress certain properties is my job. One of the major things that we are concerned with is the mechanism through which the dopant/process does what it does. Perhaps it would seem like I am splitting hairs here but that is the bottom line.

If it was possible to actually manipulate the properties of electrons themselves that would be a major breakthrough. However, to the best of my knowledge, it is not yet possible.

Link to this comment

Clay Ferguson

03/21/12 at 12:23 am

Matsci1:
You are right. I think the PopSci, guys really just write short descriptions, but the main articles or research papers or whatever are usually linked to and much more thorough. I agree with what you said, tho.

Link to this comment

quasi44

03/21/12 at 5:44 am

No doubt. Heisenberg's still the dude from what I heard once. There's just no way to tell where the hell I was when I heard it.

Link to this comment

slimjeezy

03/23/12 at 8:45 am

how would one go about producing graphene on an industrial scale? the one to find out will be the next Andrew Carnegie